The Inquirer (and others) is reporting that Apple is killing off FireWire. Jason O'Grady in particular has heard that the Intel iBooks won't have FireWire at all and the PowerBooks will only have FireWire 800. The absence of FireWire in the iPod Nano and iPod video also seems to suggest the end of Apple's own fine interface standard.
I'm not totally convinced. Apple's trying to take the price of the iBook down as far as possible so it can compete better with PC laptops. No laptops at that price range have FireWire and it would add to the costs. Also, what are the uses of FireWire? Connecting to camcorders: not a good plan with an iBook - something more powerful, with a larger disk drive suits that task better, plus how else to drive interest in the desktop iMac? Connecting to an external hard drive? There's USB 2.0 for that plus it's not top of the portable requirements list. Connecting to an iPod? No need, now they're USB 2.0.
The removal of FireWire from the PowerBook says something else though. Remember when the first iMacs came out and the only interface they had was USB, even though next to nothing worked with USB? All the manufacturers rushed to create USB-compatible printers, et al, and it wasn't long before every PC included a USB port, after years of the standard being ignored. Is Apple attempting something similar with FireWire 800? It's the fastest interface standard around, running at double the speed of both USB 2.0 and regular FireWire. Only Gigabit Ethernet is theoretically faster, but its real-world throughput isn't as good and it really isn't a device-to-device protocol like FireWire. 800 is in a slightly better position than USB anyway, since you can buy a simple adaptor to make 400 devices work with 800 ports.
FireWire 800 has languished, however, with only the pro Macs including it, making it a poor choice for any manufacturer that wants to get to as wide a market as possible. If Apple is trying to stimulate the FireWire 800 market, expect it to be included in the Intel iMacs. If FireWire's dropped from them, however, we'll know that Apple really is trying to kill off FireWire - and intends to commit suicide by abandoning camcorders as part of the “Digital Hub”.
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